Some careers are ostensibly linear. They hand you a scalpel and some scissors and leave you with a step-by-step guide, nose-to-tail. Maybe they’ll even give you formal tutelage, training hours, or supervision from a veteran cat-skinner. But not writers. Every writer has to find their own way to skin a cat.
I’m a writer; I used to shirk from that title. In university, it felt untrue to use it. It went against what was written on my diploma: Bachelor of Science. Biology. Research. But then, it felt equally untrue to not acknowledge it.
I thought I could only call myself a writer when I was published. After I’d “made it” as a freelance journalist. Or shelled out a heap of money at a writer’s program for someone to affirm that, yes, she is a writer.
I’ve met writers who swear by their MFA, and others who say it’s a waste of money. I’ve met writers who keep day jobs, who say it’s best to keep your craft unadulterated by financial need. Others write to pay bills, usually in a constant hustle for jobs they don’t like so they can afford the ones they do. Then there are writers who push out a book in one week and teach the rest of the year. Or write and instruct writing all year, continually honing their craft without the goal of publishing.
Writing is how my parents met. My father studied fiction at the Iowa Writer’s Conference, while my mother studied poetry. My mother loved it, while my father cites his time there as having “Killed his writing.” Though parts were good, he said that it was mostly insecure people trying to edit his voice into an echo of their own. Mom said his ego couldn’t take the criticism. Dad said she could never publish because she didn’t have the discipline to sit down and edit her work. Ah, writers in love.
Though she pivoted to a career in social work, there wasn’t ever doubt of my mom being a writer. She’d be up late at night, reading glasses balanced on the tip of her nose, red curly hair in a frayed knot atop her head, tapping away on a computer or scratching paper with a pen, intermittently hitting her Juul with a green glow.
Hindsight is everything. In the survivors of suicide group, all of us look back at some statement, some action, some signal that our loved one gestured and we shake our heads and say, “I should’ve known.”
But how could we? How could we possibly condone the thought that they wanted to die? Our brains are so well, so hopeful. We want more than anything to believe them when they say they are doing better.
The first couple of days after she died waver in my mind, some moments striking out lucid and sharp while most of it is just blurred, bed-ridden shock and pain.
Someone in the blurry bit (so I don’t recall who) commented that I didn’t seem surprised that she’d killed herself.
I wasn’t. Hindsight is everything. She’d been preparing me for this day for at least half my life. Perhaps since I was born.
I’ve spoken with one young person whose mother held her threatened suicide over her kid’s head, blaming them for her pain and using it as leverage at the end of every charged conversation or conflict. Not to pathologize, but that blares out some sort of personality disorder to me—give me attention and affection or so help me.
My mother, thank God, was nothing like that. She never spoke about her suicidal ideation until I was old enough to properly be taking care of her, until she was in the throws of suicidal-level-agony again.
Instead, she prepared me in confusing ways that I look back on and think “I should’ve known.”
“Vanessa,” she said, sustaining her deep blue eye contact, locked on mine, “You are the inheritor of my literary estate.”
She told me this multiple times, even years before her death. At a certain point I responded with something along the lines of, Mom you don’t have to be a Dickenson—you don’t need to die with writing in a droor. Why not try and publish some poems now?
There are other moments, too—she’d randomly go from lighthearted to leaden seriousness and give me instruction or warning. At one point I had to take a pregnancy test, and she started giving me express instructions on when and how to get the epidural in labor. I was flustered, confused, and a little hurt. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked her. “You’re going to be there when I give birth.”
She smiled and nodded and changed the subject, coming back to her ‘normal,’ which I realize now was just a mask.
I looked at a slew of Master of Fine Arts programs. It was 2020, I was a fresh graduate in the throws of COVID and lockdown. And I didn’t feel like I was a real writer yet.
I scouted places, heard feedback from the “real writers” I did know. I remember sitting with a friend’s mother on her porch. She worked at an MFA program. She asked if had a story to tell. If so, why not tell it? Why wait on another degree?
Not long after Quentin died by suicide, I remember my dad telling me, “This is something you will write about, one day.”
Being raised with such a non-neurotypical sibling, witnessing Quentin struggle through loneliness and pain and hurt and sorrow, and seeing it end in his death—that was my story.
Starting with that sunny summer day on her porch, that was my first stab at telling Quentin’s life. Pitching the hardest thing I’d lived through as a soundbite to writers and writing mentors.
I talked to book reviewers, to people in publishing, got the nuts and bolts of book proposing and was given draft examples of books that were picked up. I left a publisher in tears on the phone after retelling Quentin’s life and death. The woman asked how much of the book I’d written so far. When I told her next to nothing, she said “Six months. You’re six months out from a book proposal.”
That was in 2020. I liked that thought, but I’d been in narrative nonfiction long enough to know I needed more details. I needed to go and see where he lived, where he died, meet the people who knew him, to hear more stories about his life. I wanted to see the color of his life, the way the trees looked in the mountains when he died.
He’d been in therapeutic treatment centers and boarding schools since the age of 11—I needed to understand what that was like. So I applied to work at Spring Lake Ranch. The place he loved most, and the place he died.
Working there, I felt like my greatest skills were being called upon more than any other job I’d ever done. I didn’t know that my wide-ranging love and acceptance for the non-neurotypical was a marketable skill. I didn’t know that I’d inherited my mother’s openness, her ability to let others feel safe to unfold themselves.
Mom helped me land the job. She helped me prepare for the interview and debriefed with me afterwards.
When I asked her why she was a therapist, she told me of a client she’d worked with once. A young woman who she didn’t naturally connect with, who mom probably wouldn’t have liked very much if they met in the real world. It’d been weeks of closed sessions, walled off emotions, tooth-pulling hours of waiting for this woman to not be resistant, to open just a smidge.
After a few weeks (I think coinciding with a medication kicking in) there was a day that the woman walked into my mother’s office and something was different. The woman looked almost sheepish, as if she had finally arrived, though a little late. It was a brand new person. “I looked in her eyes and cried,” my mom told me. “And all I could say was, ‘There you are!’”
We only talked twice on the phone once I took the job at the therapeutic ranch. She gave me advice. When I told her a client reminded me of Quentin, she told me that was a powerful projection. To watch it, but know that the association had the power to do some good.
She told me her thoughts on suboxone, a drug that staves off opiate addiction. She believed there shouldn’t be prejudice against taking it, that people shouldn’t feel pressure to get off it. “If they need to take it for the rest of their lives,” she said, “So be it.”
I was excited, discovering this untapped love of psychology. I’d resisted it in college, wanting to separate myself from her. Suddenly I was excited to talk shop, to get her advice, to think about social work schools instead of MFAs.
I didn’t call her for Thanksgiving. I was working, I was tired. Then I learned she was dead. I remember my exact sequence of thoughts after I got the call. I was looking over my altar, sitting on my zafu, staring into wintery cow pastures.
This was always going to be the worst day of my life. I was always going to lose you. You were never going to live forever. This was always going to be the worst day. It just came sooner than I’d wanted.
Thank God I have so many mothers. I have so many role models, so many mother figures that have supported me in countless ways. You’ve blessed me with so many mothers.
God damn it, you changed my book. You knew I was writing about Quentin’s suicide. Now you had to go and change the story.
It took me over four years to feel comfortable writing about Quentin. To really feel the grief had abated enough for me to write truthfully. Enough time had passed to give me insight and retrospect, context and love.
I have faith in this book. I feel compelled by it, to pursue it actively without letting it slip to the recesses of “one day…” But I also know that my insight can only grow with time. I know that I’m still grieving, though I’m no longer weeping myself to sleep each night or staring numbly out of boiling-hot baths to try and feel warm again. I know that formally studying psychology and grief will only enrich whatever I write.
Internal Alchemy is my means to write the book, snippet by snippet, essay by essay. Though I do have chapters layed out elsewhere, but this is the grounds for me to draft and give glimpses of my life to you all, and see how it lands in your chests.
I’ve been in professional writing groups, therapeutic writing groups, drinking-writing groups, stoic writing groups, and casual-eat-pancakes-on-the-side writing groups. As I’ve said, there are many ways to skin a cat.
The only constant for all writers is that you need a cat to skin. You need to actually write. Internal Alchemy empowers me to weed through past journal entries, pick out something meaningful from what is mostly self-indulgent and vapid pages of complaints—what else are journals for?—sit with a coffee on my front porch, and write.
I know my mother would be proud. I know that she and Quentin both are supporting me. They deepened my life. What am I supposed to do but spin something out of that depth?
Not every week is perfect. Sometimes I reread newsletters and cringe at typos or wish I’d given myself more time to round out concepts in a piece. But this weekly practice helps me feel more connected to myself, to the people I have lost, and to you all. Writing is a gift. And you reading it is a more meaningful gift than I’d have ever imagined. Thank you for your presence, thank you for your support. It reminds me I am, unequivocally, a writer.
You are a writer, indeed, my dear. Your mom would be so pleased and satisfied to see what you are doing with your pen. The buds of Internal Alchemy are flowering! Love you lots.